Abstract: This article examines the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins through the lens of material culture, public memory, and consumer activism, arguing that mid-twentieth-century boycotts and selective buying campaigns functioned not merely as economic tactics but as cultural and political practices of refusal. Drawing on exhibits at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum (ICRCM), this essay analyzes how artifacts—lunch counter stools, receipts, menus, and segregation signage—materialize the contradictions of American democracy and render visible the economic infrastructures that sustained Jim Crow segregation. These objects demonstrate that racial exclusion operated not only through ideology and law but through everyday consumer practices and spatial regulation. By situating the Greensboro protests within scholarship on civil rights memory and African American consumer boycotts, the article traces a material genealogy of economic resistance from the 1960 sit-ins to contemporary brand activism, including the Nike–Kaepernick campaign and corporate boycotts in the digital age. It contends that museums preserve boycott artifacts in ways that mirror activists’ withdrawal from discriminatory markets: both acts mobilize absence as political force. From physical artifacts to digital hashtags, economic refusal emerges as a performative strategy that links historical struggles to ongoing confrontations with systemic racism and state-sanctioned inequity.
Christina L. Myers (Sun,) studied this question.